Daytrading to earn a living: Burma Opium king

The late drug kingpin Khun Sa who died in Rangoon in October 2007 was the son of a Chinese father and Shan mother.
He founded in 1963 a local militia in Shan State loyal to the Burmese government, which provided him with money and weapons to help the Burmese army fight Shan rebels.The Shans did not receive their independent state amidst accusations of betrayal during the British Empire.

Opium has been grown in northern mainland Southeast Asia for thousands of years and was accepted in society so long as people did not abuse it and used it only for medicinal purposes. It was the British Empire that converted opium use to the industrial level it subsequently reached. This was a deliberate policy to cause widespread addiction among Chinese people so that Chinese would purchase goods from Britain.

Khun Sa later renamed his militia the Shan United Army and turned to opium smuggling, setting up a base inside northern Thailand in the village of Ban Hin Taek. He joined forces with the Tai Revolutionary Council of Moh Heng and controlled the whole Thailand-Burma border area from Mae Hong Son to Mae Sai,Mae Salong and became one of the key figures in opium smuggling in the Golden Triangle.
Khun Sa surrendered to the Burmese army in 1996 to avoid facing drug smuggling charges brought by the US, which had offered a US $2 million reward for his arrest. He was held under house arrest in Rangoon, where he died at the age of 73.

Eventually, American air power was deployed to search out these fields and now they have been all but eradicated. The problem has not gone away, though, since those involved have switched production to methamphetamines, which can apparently be produced quite conveniently in a small factory.

Singapore is widely reported to be a financial haven for Burma's elite, including its two most notorious traffickers, Lo Hsing Han and Khun Sa.

Lo Hsing Han is the chair of Burma's biggest conglomerate, Asia World, founded in 1992. His son, Steven Law, is managing director and also runs three companies in Singapore which are "overseas branches" of Asia World. Although Singapore is proud of its mandatory death penalty for smalltime narcotics smugglers and heroin addicts, both father and son travel freely in and out of the friendly island-nation. "The family money is offshore," said a high-level US narcotics official. "The old man is a convicted drug trafficker, so his kid is handling the financial activities."

According to a high-level US government official familiar with the situation, Law's wife Cecilia Ng operates an underground banking system, and "is a contact for people in Burma to get their drug money into Singapore, because she has a connection to the government." The husband-wife team are also the sole officers and shareholders of Asia World subsidiary, Kokang Singapore Pte Ltd.

Charnnarong, who is a relative of Khun Sa, had only recently been released in the US after serving a sentence there for smuggling heroin into the country.

Tracking the Dow,Tuesday 22/12/09.Two days to pre-Christmas half day trading.

Asian Index futures expiry:31/12/09 on New Year Eve Day.

9:30am:--Overnight spillover bulls.Unshaven candlestick bottom depicting its strength.

10:30am:--First hour high with hangman.

11:30am:--Pullback to MAV support and then reverse upward.

12:30pm:--Retrace to bull pivot resistance.

1:30pm:--Afternoon session starts with a near high but were hammered.

2:30pm:--Pullback to bull pivot support with a graveyard doji.

3:30PM:--Failed the MAV support line and reverse upward.

4:00pm:--An inverted hammer.Bulls continue their advance.

A suprisingly strong report on housing provided the latest evidence that the economy is picking up speed. The gross domestic product for the July-to-September quarter was weaker but was ignored by the market.